The semiconductor industry has made significant advancements in its pursuit of higher device density with lower cost. Technological advances in semiconductor device, or integrated circuit (IC), materials and design have produced progressively smaller and more complex circuits. In the course of semiconductor device evolution, functional density (for example, the number of interconnected devices per chip area) has generally increased while geometry sizes have decreased. This scaling down process generally provides benefits by increasing production efficiency and lowering associated costs
However, increased functional density has increased the complexity of semiconductor devices, such as by decreasing the distance between interconnected layers and devices on a semiconductor device and the amount of material used to constitute the various devices and layers. This may result in semiconductor devices become more fragile as functional density increases, especially when handling or packaging semiconductor devices. Accordingly, there may be a greater chance of failures per chip area during semiconductor processing.
Therefore, conventional semiconductor device fabrication and processing are not entirely satisfactory.